Environment

As an outset of our society’s development, environmental challenges are increasing, including climate change, and Terma wishes to mitigate its impact. Committed production, design, and innovation teams work to reduce the impact of our products, services and operations and strive towards identifying innovative solutions to environmental issues, under the strict framework of the Danish environmental legislation that supports Terma’s engagement to be a responsible industrial partner.

Reducing our environmental footprint

Being part of a highly technical industry, our factories have an environmental impact that cannot be avoided. The input needed for ensuring our production ranges from various materials to natural resources such as energy and water, and it also includes a wide array of chemicals and composite products. The requirements from our customers and the specifications needed to ensure the optimal durability of our products present challenges towards a more environmentally responsible approach. Nonetheless, we aim to comply with all applicable environmental legislation and aim to identify and explore possible ways towards reducing our environmental impact. We acknowledge that in order to do so, we need to have a more detailed understanding of this impact. Therefore, we are developing a more comprehensive baseline that will allow us to develop a unified and global strategic approach to manage our environmental impact within Terma.

We are continuously investigating our production processes to identify possibilities of ensuring optimal resource efficiency. An example without investment is the autoclave process where the flow of parts and use of autoclave space have been upgraded over the last couple of years. At our production facility in Grenaa, the parts produced from carbon fiber require energy-consuming autoclaves to “bake” the parts under pressure. To avoid burns on parts in the baking process, nitrogen gas (N2) is needed instead of atmospheric air. We have succeeded in reducing the amount of N2 used significantly, due to a better flow and more efficient loading of autoclaves that in turn has resulted in lower energy consumption and reduced CO2-emissions from transport. Another opportunity is to make sure that replacement of equipment is always to the most energy efficient models. In the last couple of years, Terma has managed to save 1,000 MWh per year by installing energy efficient equipment at our offices and production facilities.

We are currently working towards strengthening our environmental organization, and as part of this commitment we have developed a global Environmental Policy and integrated the environmental aspect in our CSR Strategy.

Substituting hazardous chemicals

A constant challenge for Terma is balancing product capabilities and environmental concerns. The radar antennas and aircraft parts that Terma produces have to sustain harsh environments and must have an overall durability in extreme conditions. Those requirements are laid out by military and defense standards, detailing specifications to ensure the material can resist being exposed to altitude, high and low temperatures, harsh weather, salt, sand, dust, shock, vibration, and other demanding conditions. This creates a challenge in finding the material and the chemicals that will ensure our products’ quality and durability while living up to environmental considerations and requirements, such as the EU legislative acts RoHS/REACH. Despite the challenge of finding alternatives, we have succeeded in reducing the amount of chemicals containing hexavalent chromium by 51% since 2015 in collaboration with our customers.

Fast Track partnership

Terma participates in the Fast Track industrial partnership, which gathers Danish universities, leading research institutions, and industrial companies in finding novel solutions for surface treatment problems, all partly funded by the Danish Fund for Innovation (Innovation Fund). The partnership research has so far been focused on finding improved corrosion prevention methods in coastal areas, which applies well to Terma’s land and naval radar installations and the degradation of metallic and non-metallic structures in severe environments (hail, sea water, etc.)